


Storms

by Metagross (Eros_Scribens)



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters: Ruby & Sapphire & Emerald | Pokemon Ruby Sapphire Emerald Versions
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eating Disorders, Emerald Version Storyline, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Major characters think they're going to die and with good reason but survive, Natural Disasters, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rough Sex, animal injury, people die, tags/ratings subject to change
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-07-14
Packaged: 2018-03-14 23:55:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3430280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eros_Scribens/pseuds/Metagross
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the legendaries awaken, it sets off natural disasters all across Hoenn--and creates impacts felt long after the weather returns to normal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Storm: Day 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wallace and Steven wake to the most impossible event of their lives--and the struggle is only just beginning.

                It was an unusually warm April, and then over Sootopolis, the rain began.  At first it was welcomed; the mainland had been in borderline drought conditions for weeks.  At first it was just a drizzle.  At first.

                “ _Merciful Arceus!”_ gasped Wallace, in Ancient Sootopolitan, grabbing the city path’s guardrail for support.  This simply was not possible.  Well, it was theoretically possible, but only if one counted “theory” to mean “ancient myth.”  An ancient myth that even he, and most Archons in recent history, had thought was merely symbolic.  An ancient myth that now was apparently very real, and unfolding in all its awesome disaster on the doorstep of his own gym, in the bay of the city he governed.

                Ten minutes earlier, Wallace had been awakened by a frenzied banging on his front door.  After pulling on an old pair of mainland-style swim trunks in the half-light, he opened the door to find two extremely worried Sea Rangers.

                “Sir, you really need to see this.  It-it’s in the harbor.”

                Wallace stepped outside.  The rain and wind had worsened since last night; it was now a full tropical storm.  In late April.  With, as he recalled, no warning on BuzzNav whatsoever.  Even as the rain lashed against his bare chest, the air still seemed strangely warm—as warm as the height of summer.

                They were now almost in view of the harbor.  The Sea Rangers stopped.

                “Sir, what you are about to see is…very alarming.  We almost can’t believe it ourselves, but it’s there.”

                Undeterred, in fact slightly annoyed, Wallace shoved past the Sea Rangers and into view of the harbor.  The warning he’d just heard turned out to be a significant understatement.

                Groudon and Kyogre were battling in the bay of Sootopolis City.  Groudon had… _created_ an island and was staying on it, which had the small consolation of limiting the fight to one area.  But still, everywhere lower than the Cave of Origin (including the gym) was clearly impassable.

                Wallace pulled out his phone with shaking hands.  “Steven?” he said when his boyfriend, back at his house, groggily answered. “I’m at the harbor, near the Pokecenter.  Get dressed and come here now.”

                Twenty minutes later, Steven arrived, wearing a poncho.  Seeing the legendaries battling, he turned slightly pale and hastened to the guardrail, beside Wallace.

                “Is that--?”

                “Yes.”

                “And it’s real.”

                “Yes.”

                “What are we going to do?”

                “I don’t know.  The last recorded supposed—actually, let’s just say the last recorded appearance—was around three thousand years ago.  I didn’t think they were real.  Supposedly, Rayquaza can calm them, but I don’t know how to get that to happen.  So I think for now, I am going to put on some proper clothes, eat something, and both of us start making phone calls.”

                “What about Pacifidlog?  And Dewford and Mossdeep?”

                “The Rangers are evacuating Pacifidlog.  Should go well, they do evacuation drills monthly over there.  The real question is whether Sootopolis is safe.  Also, I’m pretty sure the only way out of here now is by air.”  Wallace turned back towards his house.

 

                Later artistic depictions of the event portray Wallace in full Gym Leader regalia.  What he actually wore during the storm—what he now changed into—was a standard orange, blue, and black diving wetsuit and a utility belt.  He came downstairs to find Steven scrambling eggs while calling the Weather Institute.

                “Yes, I am really the champion, and I need to speak to the Director.  No, I can’t leave a message.  Yes, I am aware that it is only a quarter to seven, and I don’t care if he’s asleep, just put me through to him.  Yes, I’m sure; this is a matter of national security, and I am not using that phrase out of convenience.  And…ugh, this is the worst holding music ever.”  He turned to Wallace.  “Sorry, didn’t have time to make actual omelets, there’s pickled Carvanha roe and seaweed salad in the fridge if you want that with the eggs.”

                Wallace grabbed a plate, inhaled several eggs and a quantity of omelet toppings, and called the Sea Ranger base in Dewford.  As he had hoped, both the base commander and Brawly were there; they put him on speaker.

                “Progress report on the Pacifidlog evacuation?” Wallace asked.

                “Not good.  This is an unusually violent and sudden storm, even as hurricanes go; we can’t use the helicopters.  It’s all individual water pokemon.”  This from the commander.

                “What could be causing this weather?” asked Wallace, sarcastically.

                Evidently, his tone was lost over phone static.  “Actually, we’re not sure.  We just called the Weather Institute to ask, but the guy at the front desk says he can’t tell us but it’s a, quote, matter of national security, unquote.”

                Wallace pressed his thumb and forefinger against his temples and looked at Steven, who was washing the frying pan and still muttering about the Weather Institute’s hold music.  “No, I actually do know what is going on.  You aren’t going to believe me, but—you know Granite Cave?  The paintings there?  The mythological weather pokemon?  Um—they’re actually real.  And in Sootopolis’ bay.  Groudon made an entirely new island in the middle of my city and Kyogre is having a water fight with it.”

                “Wallace, have you lost your mind?” asked Brawly.

                “I wish,” replied Wallace.  “But they’re in my city splashing each other like kids going swimming and waterlogging lower Sootopolis, and the Champion and the Sea Rangers stationed here can all see them too.  In fact, I’m facing the possibility that we might need to evacuate Sootopolis itself.”

                “Then where do we put everyone from Pacifidlog?  Sootopolis is usually where….”

                “If you can, I would be very grateful if Dewford Base would grant them hospitality.  If you can’t, or if it gets too bad out there, the Battle Resort has some high ground, though Arceus knows it’s not even open now, let alone equipped for disaster relief.  If all else fails, ask Mauville or Petalburg.”

                Steven, meanwhile, had finally gotten the Weather Institute director on the phone.  After explaining that Groudon and Kyogre were real, he got the director to send him a map of the storm patterns, and to promise updates hourly, or if anything major happened.  As an afterthought, he asked the director to send the maps to the other gym leaders and elites.

                No sooner had he hung up than his phone rang.  It was Flannery.

                “Champion Stone!  I’ve been trying to reach you for the last half hour.  I called Tate and Liza and they said you weren’t at your home.”

                “I’m in Sootopolis.  There’s a situation here.  I was on hold with the Weather Institute.”

                “Well, there’s a situation here, too.  Seismograph readings suggest Mount Chimney is going to blow.  Probably the biggest eruption since we invented seismographs.  Earthquakes have already knocked out power, and the pipes from the hot springs have burst and are spouting near-boiling water everywhere.  We need to evacuate, and Lavaridge has a high senior citizen population.  Please get here or at least send in an Elite; I request you to send in the Mountain Rangers.”

                “So that’s Groudon.”

                “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

                “Groudon,” said Steven more clearly.  “The legendary pokemon of land.”

                “And what does that have to do with Mount Chimney?”

                “The ‘situation’ in Sootopolis?  Well, the situation is that Groudon is real—as is Kyogre, by the way—and is probably causing the eruption.  I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

                Next, Wattson called, about earthquakes and power outages, and flooding in Slateport.  Then Roxanne.  Then Norman.  Then everyone else.  It was now about 8:00.  Steven texted the Elites to meet him at Ever Grande at ten.  Wallace, for his part, was talking to Dewford, again.

                “All right.  Give me three hours to deal with Sootopolis and then I’ll go to Pacifidlog.”

                The first hour mostly went towards securing cultural artifacts.  Everything had to go into waterproof vaults; centuries of books and rubrics and statues and amulets.  The rest went to evacuating the lower portions of Sootopolis; the city had flood bunkers on its higher levels.

                The storm was getting worse.  Though Sootopolis’ natural walls protected the city from much of the actual storm, anything not tied down was rolling around the streets.  Kyogre’s waves were now lapping at the Pokecenter and Pokemart, and Groudon’s island had doubled in size.  Faint tremors shook the city.  Wallace and the Sea Rangers checked; there were no cracks in the caldera for now, but if the earthquakes got stronger…well, it didn’t bear thinking about, because if that happened, there probably wouldn’t be time to think about it.

                At a quarter past nine, Steven found Wallace again.

                “ _Khalazi,_ ” he said, using the Sootopolitan form of Wallace’s name.

                “ _Stefane,_ ” replied Wallace.

                “I don’t know if any of us is going to survive this.  Between the sea and the volcano, I’m not sure that there is going to be much of Hoenn left.  But Ever Grande is high ground and has a bunker; I can take Kiri and her mother there.”

                “Yes.  And may Arceus make the precaution unnecessary.”

                The two gazed at each other for a minute.  This was not how it was supposed to end.  Not volcanos and hurricanes.  Not leaving, thinking it more likely that they’d die than live.  But land and sea were fighting, and Wallace was bound to the sea, and Steven Stone to the land that gave him his name.

                Steven was the first to break the gaze.  “You’re going to need all the help I can give.  Drake, Brawly, and even Tate and Liza will probably cooperate with you and your expertise, but even now Glacia will probably try to block things.  She has no love for Sootopolis.”  This was an understatement.  Mossdeep in general disliked Sootopolis’ control over Hoenn’s seas.  Glacia, who’d moved there from Unova in her teens, had further reason to dislike it; the Archon reminded her far too much of Unova’s terroristic royalist party. 

                “So,” continued Steven, “I’m doing this.”  Steven pulled out his phone and turned on its voice recorder.  Then he spoke, and not as Khalazi’s lover Stefanos, but as Champion Steven Stone of Hoenn.

                “I, Steven Stone, as Champion, under the statutes of the Natural Disaster Act, Section 1.3, concerning the Champion’s emergency powers, appoint Wallace Sootopolou as my deputy in the oceanic and primary coastal topographic regions of Hoenn for the immediate duration of the event caused by the conflict between Groudon and Kyogre.  While he is my deputy, he has the same powers as myself in those regions, save for the ability to command non-sea Rangers other than City Rangers already stationed in those regions, and his orders can only be countermanded by a direct order from me.”  He switched off the voice recorder.  “Now, I’m going to send this to all the Leaders, Elites, and Commanders, and upload it to the League archives.”  He pulled out two waterproof data chips and stuck them to the phone.  “And here’s two hard copies; one for you” handing one to Wallace “and one for League physical records.”

                “Steven, you didn’t have to do that.”

                “Well, it makes things a lot simpler.  You can call the Sea Rangers now, for more than just Pacifidlog.  Glacia can’t muck things up for you.  All the districts have to accept refugees if you order them to now.  Though you do have to phone in for any meetings of elites, including the one in half an hour.  Now let’s go get Helen and Kiri.”

                Helen flatly refused to go.

                “Just take Kiri.  Three people is too much for a Skarmory at any time, and especially in this weather.  She’s ten, she can handle this.”

                Wallace switched into Sootopolitan and spoke too low and fast for Steven to catch.  _“Eleni, if you ever loved me, and I know you once did, and if you love Kiri, please go to Ever Grande.  I might die in this storm.  Dimi might die out there.  Stefanos might die out there.  I want Kiri to be sure of having at least one parent left.”_

_“And I’m still not going.  We both know that the point of getting her out of here is to make sure the Sootopolou line still exists.  So I’m not going to hinder that Skarmory.  Go.  Kiri’s in her room, packing.”_

                 They found Kiri sitting on her suitcase trying to get it shut, not at all helped by Hondew, her evolving Zubat, who was fluttering around the room making confused high-pitched noises and trying to eat Kiri’s hair.

                 “Got everything?” asked Steven.

                 “Yep,” replied Kiri.  “Just let me put Hondew in her pokeball.”  She recaptured the agitated bat, tucked the pokeball in her shorts pocket, and stood up.  Even at ten, she was already nearly as tall as Steven, and looked uncannily like Ace Academy-era Wallace; scrawny, and all elbows.  “So, Uncle Steven, we’re going to Ever Grande?”

                 “Yes, and now hurry.”

                 Kiri hugged her mother and Wallace goodbye, and then climbed onto Steven’s skarmory.  Steven paused a moment, looking at Wallace, showing in his eyes all his fear and longing.

                 Wallace pulled Steven into his arms, hard, and kissed him.  They remained with their arms around each other, faces inches apart.  “ _That we may meet again,_ ” said Wallace in Sootopolitan, breaking the embrace.

                 “That we may meet again,” returned Steven, this time in Quadregion, and got on his Skarmory and flew to Ever Grande.

                 It was indeed very hard flying, even with only two people.  Steven saw Kiri to her room in the bunker before running back upstairs to the League Building proper.  The Elites were already there, and all seated, except for Sidney, who was fiddling with the settings on Wallace’s videoconference screen.

                 “Let’s begin,” said Steven.  “Groudon and Kyogre are real and causing the worst natural disaster in recorded history.  Hoenn is covered by a hurricane to end all hurricanes and Mount Chimney is about to erupt.  I’ve appointed Wallace Sootopolou as my deputy for the oceanic and primary coastal regions of Hoenn, that’s why he’s calling in here, you may have already gotten the message about that.”

                 “It seems a bit precipitous to appoint Wallace without consulting us, though I don’t dispute that Groudon and Kyogre count as a natural disaster under Section 1.3.2,” said Glacia.  “Surely Drake or I am as qualified, and take precedence in rank?”

                 “Wallace controls half the affected areas under normal circumstances, and has experience with evacuations, though on a smaller scale.  You and Drake have both been gym leaders, but neither of you currently directly control any specific district.  I’m sending you to Lillycove and Drake to Slateport; you two will work with Wallace and Commander Hunter of the Sea Rangers to coordinate evacuations in those areas.  Sidney, you go to Fallarbor and help there.  Phoebe, Fortree, Lillycove is going to be evacuated to there, probably a few other places will be too—that’s up to Wallace.  I’m going to Lavaridge.  We’ll be dealing with the Mountain and City Rangers.  All of you, get people to non-endangered areas as quickly and safely as possible.”

                 “Anything else?” asked Sidney.

                 “Not really.  Keep your phones on.  Dress warmly.  But that goes without saying.”

                 “In that case, I’m leaving for Pacifidlog,” said Wallace from the screen, and then turned off his phone camera.

                 Evacuating Pacifidlog was slow work, without helicopters.  They didn’t dare put more than 2 adults on each Gyarados; and though most Sootopolitans do raise Gyaradi, most aren’t trained enough to be ridden in rough seas.  By nightfall, only about half of Pacifidlog’s people had been evacuated.  Mossdeep, Lillycove, and Slateport were much better, and were all over two-thirds evacuated.  There simply were not enough places to evacuate the rest.

                 Meanwhile, Steven was at Lavaridge.  Mercifully, it was the off-season for tourism; only about 50,000 people to evacuate.  That was still a lot of people.  About as many people as fit in the Big Stadium in Nimbasa City, Unova.  And these people were not going to go sit in any stadium and watch a game in an orderly fashion; they were panicked and carrying luggage and had to be transported dozens of miles to soggy tent cities around Fortree City.  This meant that the Mountain Rangers had to construct a mass elevator to get people down the cliffs from Lavaridge (the cable car was too small and deemed unsafe due to earthquakes and the imminent eruption) and build a pontoon bridge across the overflowing river on Route 118 so their trucks could get across.  In addition, by this time it was so muddy that the truck wheels had to be switched out for tank treads.  However, somehow by nightfall everyone who didn’t flatly refuse to go was out of Lavaridge.

                 Steven, though, was working on the eruption defenses.  The lava-catching trenches had been built about 100 years ago, and the geological eruption records went back about 350 years, covering 5 incidents.  None was half as big as the Groudon-induced eruption seemed likely to be.  The protective walls needed to be much higher, and there was none of the proper heat-resistant imported stone to make them with.

                 “Wet sandbags,” said Steven, drawing on a whiteboard in the officers’ tent, halfway through that afternoon.  “Two walls of them, twenty feet apart, six feet high—eight would be better, but we don’t have enough for that.  On the ‘lava side,’ put any relatively non-flammable scrap material you can find.  Diagonally reinforce the town side with…whatever you can get.”

                 “And this will save Lavaridge?”

                 “Honestly, with our resources, probably not.  But it may save Mauville City.  Certainly buy time to evacuate more of Mauville.  Anyone got a better idea?”

                 No one had.  Trucks were sent to Slateport for sandbags, and empty sandbag bags, since those were lighter and could be filled in the desert.  Lavaridge is not a large town, and the Mountain Rangers are a fairly large corps.  By the time it was truly too dark to see, the walls were built.  Exhausted from moving sandbags for ten hours, Steven fell into his hammock in the camp on Route 111 in his clothes and without dinner.  And that was the first day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this point in my timeline for this ship, Wallace is 30, and Steven has literally just turned 31--he's in Sootopolis that morning because the previous day was his birthday, which he was spending with Wallace. Enjoy having me twist the knife I've just stabbed into your feels.


	2. The Storm: Day 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mount Chimney erupts, and Sootopolis faces possible obliteration. Both Steven and Wallace see things that can't be unseen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter that most of the really scary tags apply to.

Later artistic depictions of the event portray Steven in ceremonial Rustboro Leader regalia (Hoenn Champions wear the Leader costume of their home district).  In fact, what he’d been wearing the entire previous day, and didn’t get to change out of until the end of the storm, was a pair of Ranger-surplus cargo pants, rainboots, a t-shirt, two hoodies, and the previously noted (oversized, bright yellow) rain poncho.  And this, minus the poncho, was what he was wearing when he was shaken awake at 4 am by a very concerned Ranger private.

“Seismic readings indicate eruption within three hours.”

“All right, I’m coming; I want to see the reports.  Is there anything to eat, too?”

Steven poured over the seismograph readouts as he shoveled grits into his mouth, wincing at the taste; they were burnt and unsalted.  Not that it mattered.  With these readings, it looked like soon nothing was going to matter.  Already, the earthquakes alone counted as a serious national disaster.  And then the hurricane, the lava flow, the tsunami that would surely start after the mountain blew, if it hadn’t already….

A sort of paradoxical calm settled over Steven.  The thing about having generalized anxiety, the way Steven did, is that you constantly imagine and rehearse worst-case scenarios in your head.  Granted, the waking of sworn enemy legendary beasts who can cause four kinds of natural disasters at once by their stray psychic energies was one of the (fairly few) worst-case scenarios Steven had never even thought of, but the same thing still applied: When a specific terrible thing does happen, there is almost a sense of relief, a sense of “I got this,” a sense of “I’m not crazy.”  This had been building from the moment Steven had seen the legendaries in the Sootopolis harbor, but the full force of the almost terrible calm really only hit now, even as the seismograph readouts shook before his eyes with the force of even greater shocks than the paper displayed.  There would of course be hell to pay later, but for now, for Steven, there was only a finality of being and doing.

The strongest quake yet almost knocked Steven out of his chair; at the same time, a siren went off.  That must be the eruption.  Steven rushed out of the tent into the early morning light, falling into the mud a few times, until he found the Ranger colonel.

“The mountain’s erupting?  Are the sandbag walls holding up?” asked Steven.

“Yes, but the lava hasn’t hit the walls yet.  We’ve got fliers up there with cameras, see?” the colonel said, showing Steven a tablet with three split video feeds.  As Steven watched, holding onto a Ranger truck for support amid the quakes, the glowing, bubbling molten rock spread down and covered the once-orderly ledges of Jagged Pass, down to the diversion channel, where it paused for a few minutes, but then (as predicted) overflowed, and down to the sandbag walls; it hissed and burnt the bags and some of the sand spilled, but it seemed like it would hold.

And then the entire world shook, and Steven, the colonel, and the truck were thrown headlong into the mud, as the entire side of Mount Chimney opened, splitting down from what would much later be found to be the abandoned Magma base, to the base of the cliffs below Lavaridge.  What use is a six-foot wall of sandbags when there is a thousand-foot rift in the earth they stand on?  And the lava, now diverted from Lavaridge but in the worst way possible, poured directly toward the camp on Route 111.

Steven rubbed the mud out of his eyes just in time to see the tongue of lava headed towards him.  He stumbled to the nearest higher ground, dragging the unconscious Ranger colonel with him.  Then, seeing the lava still coming, he let out his Skarmory, got himself and the colonel on its back, and flew up.

Most of the rangers in the battalion that had stayed on 111 had managed to get out the way Steven had, but not all.  And Steven could only watch as the lava took the remaining dozens, who slipped in the mud or were still down from the quake or simply could not run fast enough to escape the trail of liquid fire hissing along the sodden earth.  Could only watch, and hear the screams, and smell the burning flesh; and he lost his breakfast and then smelled _that_ burning in the lava, too.

And there was nothing he could do about any of it.

 

Wallace only realized he’d been asleep at his desk when the motion of the ground beneath him shook him awake.  He’d gone to bed so late, after the agonizingly slow and still incomplete evacuation of Pacifidlog, and only after Juan had insisted…and then up so early.  Yawning, he picked himself and the evacuation reports up off the floor.

“So, I take it something just happened?” he asked the Sea Ranger who had just run in the door.

“Dewford base just called in.  It appears that Mount Chimney has erupted, though they haven’t gotten confirmation from the Mountain Rangers yet.  But it apparently looked pretty clear through a telescope.  Sir.”

“When are you Rangers going to find a proper gender-neutral honorific,” grumbled Wallace, still straightening out the reports.  “‘Archon’ would do, in my case.  Anything else I should know about?”

“Juan wants you to meet him at the west caldera wall, just above the floodline.  Says it’s urgent, S—Archon.”

“I’ll be there in five,” said Wallace, smiling a little, despite the situation.

 

He found his father trying to read the instructions for a sonar machine, without reading glasses.

“Wallace, can you actually see this and tell me how to turn it on?”

Wallace squinted at the (admittedly incredibly small) print.  “Um, the green button there, then that’s the menu, then select things with the triangular keys—do you just want me to do this?  Also, are the walls okay?”

“There’s some cracks, which you’d have noticed if you hadn’t immediately looked at the machine.  We’re trying to see how bad they are, if they go all the way through,” said Juan, letting Wallace at the control panel.

“Ok, got it, now put the scanner thing—it’s the flat rubber thing with a plastic back—on the wall in the center of where you want to scan, push it against the wall hard and hold it there, and then tell me when—and then don’t move till I say so.”

Wallace pressed the green button again to start the scan; the machine let out a high-pitched whine for nearly half a minute, then beeped to show it had finished scanning, and then started whirring as it printed out the scan results.  Wallace grabbed the paper and started looking at the graphs; Juan looked over his shoulder and moved his head back and forth, trying to focus on the paper.

“ _Ah shit,_ ” said Wallace, switching languages.  It was indeed very bad.  The cracks did go all the way through the caldera wall, and branched off in several places; and according to the seismograph still scribbling away next to the scanner (and confirmed by the occasional human-perceptible shake every few minutes), the earth was still moving, so the cracks were only going to get worse.  Wallace turned toward his father, and they both looked at each other for a long, grim, minute, until Wallace finally said the two words they’d both been thinking, but hadn’t wanted to speak.

 _“Operation Archive.”_  

It was said.  The last-ditch plan drawn up by Kallistos II over 100 years before, the same archon who had installed the waterproof vaults that Wallace had filled and sealed with artifacts less than 24 hours before.  Operation Archive was this: In the event that Sootopolis and/or the Sootopolitan people were threatened with complete destruction, Ever Grande was bound by an amendment to the original Sootopolitan Conjunction Treaty to house 3,000 ethnic Sootopolitans from Sootopolis or Pacifidlog, who had been selected by the Archon.  In all simulations of Operation Archive—and every Archon is required to run a computer simulation at least once in their tenure—the 3000 are all Sootopolitans between 10 and 20 (the endpoint numbers expand or contract with population demographics), plus about a dozen older “lorekeepers,” to preserve the culture along with the people.  Juan, as an ex-archon, was automatically in the latter category.

The plan had never actually been used before.

“ _You think it’s necessary?_ ” asked Juan.

_“If this keeps up, and it looks like it’s doing just that.”_

_“How soon?”_

_“You’ll all leave starting at noon tomorrow.  I’m going to run the simulation program with the most recent census numbers, to see who goes.  Thank Arceus, this time of year quite a lot of the demographic target is already out of Sootopolis, at school.  I’ll factor that into the program.  As soon as I have the list of people, I’ll announce it—so in a couple hours.”_

_“You said ‘you all’—what if you need me here?”_

_“I’ll manage.  You, though, are the foremost lorekeeper we have.  And a Sootopolou, as you have never failed to remind me so long as I can remember.  Kiri is not old enough to be an archon.  You should go.  Please.”_

_“I won’t make you have to formally order your own father.  Go, run the simulation.”_

 

Back at his house, which was high enough up on the caldera to still be usable, thank whichever pre-Conjunction archon had built it—Wallace was too busy to remember whether it was Thalassokyrios or Kheimon—Wallace unlocked a safe in his master bedroom (waterproof, just like the archive vaults), and pulled out an archaic style of data chip, an equally archaic chip reader, and several converter cords.

Wallace turned on his computer, plugged in the chip and all the cords, and opened a password-protected program he hadn’t seen in nearly ten years.  This was not, actually, the program on the ancient data chip.  It was a program to make the other program executable.  The actual Operation Archive Simulator program was written in a programming language that was, as far as Wallace or Juan knew, unique to that very program.  For one thing, it was based on Sootopolitan and used the Sootopolitan alphabet and numeric system.  (Wallace was very glad that motion recognition had been nonexistent a hundred years ago.  Otherwise, the program’s input might very well have been underwater sign language.  He shuddered at the thought.)  Other than that, it was a fairly simple data-organizing program.  It could load a text file of Sootopolitan census data (provided the text in the file was in Sootopolitan characters and numerals), count the number of people within an inputted dd/mm/yyyy birth date range, and then, once the range was narrowed to under 2975 results, to output the results list, with known addresses.  And the program operator could also load a specific list of results to be excluded—in this case, a text file of the teenage Sootopolitans enrolled at Ace Academy or in the first seven gyms of their challenge route.

There were, apparently, 2847 adolescent Sootopolitans in Sootopolis City eligible for evacuation, given the default age parameters.  Make that 2846, thought Wallace; Kiri was already at Ever Grande.  But this was good.  He could send the secondary lorekeepers.  If time and weather allowed, he could send some of the parents of the youngest children.  (That would let him get Helen out of here, at any rate.)  Wallace finished copy-pasting the results list and the lorekeepers lists into a massive evacuation roster (it ran to nearly 60 pages), uploaded it to the UST Weather Alerts site, and printed thirty-four copies onto two reams of waterproof paper, doublesided.

As the printer whirred, Wallace did something that would have scandalized his father, but which someone should probably have done three archons ago: he took two blank stick-transfer data chips, and copied the OA Simulator to one, and the code translation program to the other, and then protected access to the chips themselves by requiring the password for the other chip’s program.  He locked the two chips into the wall safe, along with the converter cords and the original ancient chip and reader.

Emerging from the house, Wallace flagged down the nearest sea rangers, dumped about two hundred pages on each, and told them to put the lists up in strategic public places, and definitely one in each flood bunker.  Then, he went to find Juan, taking the last copy of the list with him.

“I ran the program, and here’s the list.  You, obviously, are head of the expedition.  Would it be overly much to ask you to start heading the preparations as well, after I make the initial radio announcement, so I can go work on Pacifidlog?  You’ve been an archon; you know the program well enough to explain it.”

“Yes of course go evacuate Pacifidlog.  I’d do the same.”

 

Sootopolis has emergency loudspeaker radios, mostly for severe weather alerts.  One in each of the flood bunkers at the caldera’s absolute rim, and one on a pole every few blocks.  Most of the speaker poles double as lamp posts, and usually no one gives them much notice.  But now Wallace would use them to give possibly the most important message in the history of Sootopolis.

“This is Wallace, Archon of Sootpolis, speaking,” Wallace said, after the initial fanfare of sirens that preceded alerts died down.  “You may already know that Mount Chimney erupted earlier this morning.  Earthquakes from that eruption have created cracks in the structure of the Sootopolitan Caldera.  Since the earthquakes have still not stopped and we can’t determine when they’re likely to, I have decided to initiate Operation Archive.  I repeat, I am initiating Operation Archive.  All Sootopolitans ages ten to twenty are being evacuated to Ever Grande City, starting at noon tomorrow, plus all designated primary and secondary lorekeepers.  This is to ensure the preservation of the Sootopolitan people and culture.  Lists of evacuees can be found in all flood bunkers and in the PokeCenter and PokeMart, as well as digitally at the UST Weather Alerts site.  Operation Archive will be headed by Chief Lorekeeper and former Archon Juan Sootopolou; please direct any further questions to him.”

Wallace then repeated himself in Sootopolitan.

 _“I’d have done the Sootopolitan first, if I were you,”_ remarked Juan, pointedly speaking in the traditional language.

_“You know that not even everyone in Sootopolis speaks it fluently anymore—and I’m talking about ethnic Sootopolitan families, too.”_

_“Well, the Sootopolous are not one of those families.”_ (Wallace suppressed an urge to roll his eyes, even though he agreed with the broader sentiment.) _“And the list, that’s in Sootopolitan characters, is it not?”_

 _“Yes, because the program is, and because it was already fifty-eight pages long.  But a lot of the letters are similar, most people can recognize at least their own name written out, and if they can’t, they can get someone too.  It’s different with spoken language.”_ Wallace paused _.  “Why are we arguing about this?  I’m going to Pacifidlog, and I don’t know if I’ll make it back.  Whatever language, it doesn’t matter if we don’t save something.”_

Juan held out his arms in agreement, and Wallace went to him and let his father hug him.  And Juan’s hand stroked his hair, and for a moment Wallace felt as if he were a child again, like the day he’d gotten on the ferry to Lilycove and the academy, and that morning he’d dyed his hair purple (it had been the least expensive color of dye), deliberately making it too late to change the color back, afraid his father would think he was ashamed of his heritage, covering up his hair that was as dark and coarse as the soot and charcoal that mainlanders used to mock people like him—but Juan, after the initial, unavoidable double-take, had said nothing about it, and had only hugged his son tighter—for the same reason, the adult Wallace realized, as he did now.

_“Be careful out there, Khalaziki.”_

_“I’ll try.  You too.”_

 

The seas were twice as bad as yesterday; the evacuation was going even slower.  Gyaradi and Pelippers can’t hold very many people, and Wailords have terrible, terrible coordination.  And so there were still a few people on the floating town’s rafts when Mount Chimney unleashed its second major eruption, just short of twelve hours after its first one, and with it—more importantly, here—a second earth-shuddering quake, and a large wave.

Even so, Pacifidlog’s anchors should have held.  The actual rationale behind evacuating Pacifidlog was fear of waves sweeping the place, or the sea rising beyond the reach of the anchor chains and flooding it.  Perhaps the first major quake had damaged the concrete bases, and the second only finished them; no one knows.  They had been inspected the previous November, and weren’t due again until May, and of course nobody was going to inspect them during a storm.  Whatever the exact cause, there is no disputing the effect: The anchors failed.

Wallace was not, technically, on the town, but in it, in the water with his Gyarados, next to the Pokemon Center.  And when the earthquake and then the wave hit, all at once he saw the northeastmost raft be peeled up by the rising water, and then smashed down directly towards him, and the rest of the town followed.

Wallace and his Gyarados were swept downstream as well.  There was pain down his right side as some of the wreckage hit him, and a lot of noise (he later realized that a good deal of it was himself screaming), and a massive confusion of wood and water all tumbled together.  And then at last, because at some point he’d had the sense to turn his Gyarados against the current and try to shield himself with his arms, he was clear of the wave, and there was one of those little islands that dotted the rapids below Pacifidlog—or where it had been.

There was a lot of blood, and most of it wasn’t his.  The Gyarados had a deep gash on its right side, and _merciful Arceus, were those organs?_ “Shit shit shit shit shit.”  Wallace reached for his trainer’s first aid kit, realized that that wouldn’t at all help, and instead got out Gyarados’ pokeball (fortunately not damaged), and put the unfortunate mon in it, toggling the settings to full stasis.  Only then did Wallace realize that he himself had several fairly deep cuts on his right arm and leg.  The first aid kit could actually help with those.

And so Wallace sat on a half-submerged sandbar in the fading light, holding a pokeball he didn’t dare open, his entire world quite literally turned on its head.  Gyaradi typically live about as long as their owners; Wallace had never really thought he might possibly lose his.  This went beyond normal battle injuries.  Had he gotten it into the ball fast enough?  Did the Sootopolis PokeCenter even have the ability to deal with this?  Could he even get back to Sootopolis?  The Gyarados had been his main riding-trained mon.  His Pelipper could in theory get him back, but the weather was too bad to actually fly.

Well, he had better try.  Who knew when or if the volcano would erupt and shake the earth again.  Wallace put one pokeball in his utility belt and took out another, and let out the Pelipper.

It was well after 10 pm when Wallace finally dragged himself to the makeshift elevators at the base of the outer caldera—the Pelipper was more skimming the surface of the water than actually airborne.  He was taken to the Pokecenter for medical attention; Juan burst in as he was finishing being stitched up.

 _“By Origin Cave, you’re not dead,_ ” exclaimed Juan in relief.

“Did anyone else make it back?” asked Wallace.

“Not as far as we know.  That route does have a lot of tiny places, but we’ve got nothing from Slateport or Dewford.  I thought—” Juan broke off.

“I’m alive.  I steered upstream.  My Gyarados is hurt, but should make it.  They say.”  He winced.

“I can give you some pain medication,” said the nurse.

“I’m not taking anything stronger than over-the-counter until this is over.”

“Wallace, you do need to sleep.”

“Okay.  But make sure I do wake up early tomorrow.”

 

Meanwhile, Steven was sitting in a tent between Mauville and Verdanturf, where the remainder of the Mountain Ranger battalion had regrouped.  Earlier—while, in fact, Wallace was struggling back to Sootopolis—someone had posted a video on several social media sites, claiming to be the leaders of the two ecoterrorist groups that had been running around Hoenn for the past couple years.  And they’d claimed responsibility for waking the legendaries, though they also stated that they hadn’t expected a widespread natural disaster to happen.  And the video seemed credible.  There were details that couldn’t have been known by anyone who had a clearance much lower than Steven’s own, or had actually committed the crime, and Steven knew by sight everyone in the former category.

The worst part was that on a certain level, Steven had known.  He’d known about the stolen orbs.  He’d known what the orbs were for.  He had just never believed that what the orbs were supposed to do was actually possible.  Nor had anyone else, for that matter, but it was Steven who had had the final say, and put the matter on the back burner, thinking the orbs were likely to be sold to collectors, and to focus on the black market instead.

And now there were people dead.  And Steven sat in his tent, awake, staring into the night but seeing only flowing lava and gaping earth, as the minutes ticked toward midnight, and the end of the second day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The computer program that Wallace uses is, apart from its odd language, actually simple enough that it is quite possible that Kallistos II himself or one of his family members wrote it. Similarly, the translation program is essentially a command library.  
> Wallace's house is around 400 years old. It's also pretty huge. Usually, Sootopolitans refer to it as the "Archonoskepi," which means "Archon's house," but they use the word even when talking in Quadregion, like it's a place name.  
> Yes, I promise to explore the relationship between Wallace, Juan, and Sootopolitan-ness more in later fics.


	3. The Storm: Day 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rayquaza awakens, and the storm ends--well, the weather part does.

Wallace came up from the blackness of sleep in confused flailing, almost hitting Juan, who was shaking him awake.  He found himself on his living room couch, under a blanket, in the light of full morning.  And everything hurt.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“ _Eight_ ,” replied Juan.

“ _You let me sleep till eight am?!?  The evacuation starts in four hours!  Did anybody from the Sea Rangers call?_ ”

“ _You needed it.  And if it helps, I already made breakfast_.”

Wallace was going to protest that it didn’t help, he should have been woken two hours ago, but then his father handed him a full plate and a fork and a mug, and he forgot to do anything but eat for the next three minutes.  Juan had cooked him a traditional Sootopolitan breakfast: a seaweed omelet, toast with sweet-salty honey-roe spread, and seaweed-based “tea” with a lot of milk and sugar (more than Wallace would have put in, these days).  It was the exact same breakfast that Juan had used to make for Wallace when he was in grade school.

“ _So, did anyone call?”_ asked Wallace again, once he’d finished half the omelet and gotten a good start on the toast.

_“Yes; the commander at Dewford did.  General stuff about evacuation logistics, which, if I recall, you did authorize me to handle.  But then also, some Rangers from the Mossdeep base got here last night, and they brought along a couple of ace trainers who purportedly have information about Rayquaza.  I told them you’d see them at nine.”_

_“Well, I suppose if Groudon and Kyogre are real…but how?  Why would a couple of teenagers know?”_

_“I don’t know.  Just meet with them.  The Mossdeep base commander wouldn’t tell me anything, but he vouched for them.”_

 

Half an hour later, Wallace greeted the two 19-year-old ace trainers and let them into his home office.  Their names were Brendan and May, he learned; they were both from Greater Petalburg, and Mossdeep was their seventh gym.

“About a year and a half ago, the two of us were approached by the International Police,” began Brendan.  “They wanted us to infiltrate these eco-terrorist teams, to try to get information on what they were doing, what their scientific opinions were.  I was supposed to get Magma; May, Aqua.”

“We weren’t actually supposed to interfere with anything—they wanted to minimize risk to us, see,” said May.  “Just information.  And we didn’t get far enough up in the ranks, either of us, to learn very much about actual operations in time to stop things from happening, but we did learn some things about the weather pokemon.”

“So you mean about Rayquaza, not just Groudon and Kyogre,” said Wallace.

“Yes,” answered May.  “So Rayquaza is supposed to be in Sky Pillar—”

“You think I don’t know about Sky Pillar?” broke in Wallace.  “My entire job is knowing about things like Sky Pillar.  And then I occasionally battle-test ace trainers like yourselves.  So let me tell you about Sky Pillar.  Yes, in ancient legends, which I admit do in fact have more veracity than I would have lent to them three days ago, Rayquaza comes down from Sky Pillar and calms Groudon and Kyogre.   But I’ve been up Sky Pillar myself, when I first became Gym Leader here, and there is nothing up there.  Not unless Rayquaza is actually a nearly 3000-year-old fresco painted with vegetable dyes.  And the method for waking Rayquaza has been lost.  There was never an orb for Rayquaza, even.”

“According to Team Magma’s research, Rayquaza can only be awakened after both Groudon and Kyogre are awakened,” said Brendan.  “Though if it’s up there, now, it would likely look like a statue of Rayquaza.  I wasn’t there when Maxie actually woke Groudon, but he had it recorded, and then made everyone watch the recording.  Groudon looked like a reddish statue, sandstone maybe, clay maybe, and when Maxie took out the blue orb, it started glowing, and then the statue grew, and turned into Groudon.  And then Groudon walked out of wherever it was that they were actually filming this, presumably heading for Sootopolis.”

“And I actually was there when Archie woke Kyogre,” added May.  “I was supposed to be just guarding the sub, but I snuck in—Kyogre was in an undersea cave, you see.   And it looked like an ice sculpture, until the orb thing—and then basically it was like what Brendan said about Groudon.”

Wallace, meanwhile, tried not to show how startled he was.  A clay Groudon, an ice Kyogre—these were, in fact, precisely like the New Year’s ceremony he performed every year.  The archon melted the ice and mixed it with the raw clay, and then shaped the result into a Rayquaza statue, which was then fired.  So yes, might it be that the real Rayquaza “statue” would appear only now?

“So,” Brendan was saying, “we want to climb Sky Pillar, to see if anything is there now.  And you control access to it.”

“Are you two insane?” replied Wallace.  “Have you seen Sky Pillar, ever?  The building is in terrible condition, to begin with; it got pretty badly damaged, in the fighting prior to the Sootopolitan Conjunction.  And then there are these earthquakes.  It could fall down any moment, if it hasn’t already—may I remind you, Pacifidlog went down yesterday, and it was in a lot better repair.  Climbing that tower would be suicide.  I won’t allow it.”

“Well, what are you going to do then?” asked Brendan, angrily.  “Just wait for those two monsters to stop fighting?  Until all of Hoenn, or even the world, is just so much churning mud?  Because they don’t seem anywhere close to stopping now.  If there’s a chance this could work, we’ve got to try it.”

“Please,” added May, “we were the ones who were supposed to give the International Police enough info to stop this from happening at all.  We couldn’t do that.  Just please let us do this.  If we don’t make it up to the top, it’s just that much sooner than if we didn’t try.”

Wallace put his head in his hands.  These were children.  Legally adults and thinking of themselves as adults, yes, but comparatively, children.  If they were Sootopolitan, he’d be sending them to Ever Grande.  But was it that much worse?  A crumbling tower shaken by earthquakes, or the mercies of the sea, on the back of a Gyarados?  And yet, already, he knew he was likely to be remembered as either one of the bravest Archons in history, or one of the worst.  He’d woken to two mythical monsters fighting in his front yard, and stood firm.  He’d already initiated Operation Archive.  He’d survived Pacifidlog.  And Wallace knew that he himself would dare climb Sky Pillar, if he knew it would stop the storm and the fighting, if he weren’t already hurt, if he weren’t required to live if at all reasonably possible, as the Archon of Sootopolis.

“I’ll let you go,” he said at last.  “But please, use extreme caution.  Have a very obedient bird pokemon out at all times, and keep in phone contact with me, Juan, and the Mossdeep commander.  Come with me, and I’ll see if I can borrow a surfing pokemon from a Sea Ranger; my Gyarados is currently out of commission.”

By 10:30, they were at the foot of Sky Pillar—Wallace had ridden by himself on a borrowed Gyarados (it was smaller than his own, and with different markings, and he kept thinking it was looking at him suspiciously), and Brendan and May each behind a Sea Ranger.  It was not very far, from Sootopolis City to Sky Tower, but the seas were so bad that it took nearly an hour to get there, and all the skills of Wallace, the Rangers, and the Gyaradi.  The tower was still standing.  It looked considerably more dilapidated than before—Wallace wondered if he was doing the right thing, and realized that only time would let him know—but still standing.  The locked door at the base of the tower was not part of the original construction, but painted stainless steel, from a much later date; Wallace unlocked it.  Brendan and May walked inside, armed with flashlights, ropes, and (between them) twelve pokemon.  Wallace and the Rangers stood outside the door until the footsteps and flashlight beams faded into the tower and the sounds of the ever-present storm, then they turned back towards Sootopolis.  There was nothing more they could do here.  They could only wait on time, fate, and the storm.

As soon as he got back to Sootopolis, Wallace found Juan alternately giving commands about the evacuation and talking to Brendan and May, who were now apparently more than halfway up the tower.  Wallace got out his phone—noticing for the first time that the screen was slightly cracked, from the wreckage that had hit him last night—and added himself to the group call.

“So, we’ve climbed up three floors now,” said Brendan, a bit out of breath.  “Mostly, the building seems pretty stable—ah, shit!” (partially muffled by a loud crash).

“Hello? Hello? Are you guys okay?” asked Wallace.

“Yeah, fine.  This big-ass piece of rock fell out of the ceiling.” (Wallace concealed his alarm.  Brendan continued.)  “Anyway, there’s a floor above us, and what looks like another floor after that, from looking through this hole in the ceiling.”

“You said you climbed up three floors?  Assuming you didn’t count the ground floor in that, yeah, there’s one more floor, and then the next one’s the roof.  Any sign of Rayquaza yet?”

“Not yet.  We’re thinking the roof’s the most likely place.”

At this point, Juan turned to Wallace.  “ _It’s fifteen minutes to noon,”_ he said _.  “I can’t stay inside the caldera any longer.  It’s time to put people on Gyaradi.”_

 _“I’ll call you if anything changes,”_ promised Wallace.

Half an hour passed, as Wallace listened to Brendan and May pick their way through the increasingly treacherous fifth floor of Sky Pillar, until they found the final ladder and clambered out onto the roof.

“Hooooly shit,” said Brendan, his voice dropping to a slightly panicked whisper.

“I’m turning on my video feed,” said May.  “You have got to see this.”

What Wallace saw, through a rather shaky and smudged cell phone camera, and his own cracked screen, was a very large, green pokemon.  Not even a statue, but a visibly breathing animal, a huge snake-like creature nearly seventy feet long.  It was curled up, apparently sleeping.

“Can you…wake it up?  Safely?” he asked.

“We can try,” said May, walking closer to Rayquaza, still filming with her phone.  She was close enough now that Wallace could see the creature’s shut, black eyelids and individual face scales.  May’s hand came into the camera view, and Wallace watched in apprehension as May reached over and touched Rayquaza on the snout.

Wallace’s screen turned into a blur and then went black as May and her phone were flung back across the roof of the tower.  Rayquaza was awake.

“May?  Brendan?  Are you all right?”

“I’m okay,” said Brendan.  “I think May’s okay.  Yeah, she’s standing up.  Rayquaza’s gone—flew off.”  There was an unintelligible voice in the background.  “May says her phone’s broken.”

“Try to get down from the tower, okay?  Monitor May for any signs of concussion—sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, and so on.  Try to stay safe.”

Well, then, Rayquaza was real, and awake, and would either fix everything or make the situation unimaginably worse.  He had better call Steven about this.  Wallace listened to Steven’s phone ring for what seemed a very long time before the man himself finally answered.

“Steven,” Wallace asked, “is there any way possible for you to come to Sootopolis right now?  I need you.”  He explained about Rayquaza.

Steven, for his part, had spent the entire morning realizing the futility of fighting against the earth itself—and that the Mountain Rangers were, at this point, considerably better at trying to fight the earth than he was.  There were, after all, new developments with the legendaries, and the Rangers could divert lava from Mauville without him.  It wasn’t like he’d helped very much so far, anyway.  He could go to Wallace, and no one could really accuse him of being motivated purely by sentiment.

“What’s the fastest way to get from Mauville to Sootopolis, in this weather?” he asked.

“Fly to Lilycove, find a Sea Ranger there, and get them to take you here by a surfing pokemon.  Don’t surf on your own; the Rangers are trained for rough seas and you’re not.  Try not to attract too much attention.  I’m in the middle of trying to evacuate people and don’t want any more confusion.  But please hurry.”

Wallace waited.  Brendan and May were nearly at the bottom of Sky Pillar; he sent Sea Rangers to get them.  Juan checked in every so often, the Dewford and Mossdeep commanders checked in every so often, but most of what he had to do was stand on the terrace over the half-waterlogged Cave of Origin and wait.  Groudon’s island was now nearly half of the harbor, had connected with the Gym’s island (it had risen out of the flooding, probably also due to Groudon), and was nearly touching the regular caldera land itself; Wallace wondered if this meant Groudon was winning.  Whether, even if Rayquaza failed to appear, the battle and the storm would eventually stop—but at what cost to the balance of the world.

And then Steven arrived, looking much the worse for wear.

“Dear Arceus, are you okay?” Wallace asked.  “You look like you haven’t slept in days.”

“Well, you look like you haven’t shaved in days,” said Steven, dismissively.

Wallace put his hand to his face as if slapped.  Facial hair was his one sore point; he hated having it.  When he didn’t have to deal with semi-mythical pokemon in his front yard, he usually shaved twice a day.  And usually, Steven knew better than to make comments about it.

“I’m sorry,” Steven said, after a moment.  “That was uncalled for.  You’re right, I haven’t slept, not since the first night.  I couldn’t.”

They turned towards the harbor in silence.  Below them, Groudon and Kyogre roared; Groudon dodged an ice beam and landed a magma-hot claw slash on Kyogre’s face.  Kyogre cried out and fell back, and the land crept forward into the harbor a little bit.

Still no sign of Rayquaza.  Wallace moved closer to Steven and took his hand.

“In public?” asked Steven.

“Who cares at this point?”

Wallace checked his phone with his free hand.  Brendan and May were down from the tower and on the way back to Sootopolis; Wallace, thinking of the latest sonar report, told them to try for Mossdeep.  Juan had sent a message that the first group from Operation Archive had arrived at Ever Grande.  Everyone remaining in Sootopolis was now in the flood bunkers furthest from the worst of the cracks.

And still no Rayquaza.  And so the Champion of the land and the Archon of the sea stood hand in hand, waiting.

And then Wallace saw a tiny shape in the sky.  He pointed it out to Steven, shaking him out of a waking dream of lava and hissing mud.

“Are you sure that’s not just a swablu or something?”

“I’m not,” admitted Wallace.  “But if it is just a bird, it’s the first one I’ve seen since the storm began.”

The shape grew larger as it flew down towards Sootopolis, till it was clearly not a swablu or any other ordinary bird pokemon, but definitely a snake-like creature in the sky.  It flew down past the rim of the caldera, a gleaming streak of green, black and gold: Mega Rayquaza.

It stopped in the air above Groudon and Kyogre, as the sky hangs above earth and sea alike.  And then the Sky Pokemon opened its mouth and let out a roar such as had not been heard for three thousand years.

Wallace and Steven immediately covered their ears, but it did no good.  It was as if the sky and land and sea, their own very blood and bones, had been turned to sound.  Rayquaza’s cry wailed high into the supersonic ranges, pounded deeper than the shaking of the earth; sounded on every tone known to the human ear, and on those no ear created can even perceive.  Recordings, and those who heard it far away, in Mossdeep or Dewford or Fallarbor, set it at about three and a half minutes.  For Steven and Wallace, and for everybody else in the actual caldera of Sootopolis, it was simply an eternity.  None of them remembers how it sounded.  It was too much, for ears to hear or the mind to comprehend.  They remember simply that There Was Noise; and for some, that is all.  Steven is pretty sure he had his eyes closed, trying to hide some part of himself from the all-encompassing, terrible Sound—at any rate, he does not remember seeing anything.

Wallace saw.  Groudon and Kyogre froze in mid-strike, listening to Rayquaza calling to them from mid-air.  And then, even as the caldera still echoed from Rayquaza’s cry, Rayquaza turned and plunged into the Cave of Origin directly below Wallace’s feet, followed by Groudon and Kyogre.

This last part, Steven did see—the tails of Groudon and Kyogre going into the cave.  And Steven and Wallace looked at each other, and around them, as the earth stopped moving and the rain stopped falling and the waves died down to calm.  And then Wallace looked down at the Cave of Origin and said, “I am definitely not going in there.”

He turned back, and noticed Steven swaying on his feet.  He realized what was happening; he’d seen Steven shut down before, after noisy, stressful social events.  And the storm, even just its ending, was far worse than any festival or Pan-Hoenn Conference.

“No, Steven, don’t collapse on me, my arm’s hurt, I can’t carry you!  Come on, can you please make it back to the house?”

It was a good thing that Sootopolis City is very small.  Wallace managed to get Steven into the house, out of his wet poncho and hoodies, and onto the couch, and that was it; Steven was asleep within seconds, completely exhausted.  He didn’t wake up even when his phone rang, a few minutes later; Wallace had to answer.  It was Flannery.

“Champion Stone?  Are you there?”

“Actually, this is Wallace.”

“Is the Champion okay?”

“I think he will be.  He’s alive, but asleep on my couch.  Have the earthquakes and volcano stopped?”

“How did you know?”

“You know there was a third Weather Pokemon—Rayquaza?”

Wallace spent the afternoon and evening fielding calls from two phones while simultaneously trying to cook dinner.  He managed to wake Steven up long enough to feed him, but he fell asleep again immediately after.

It was decided that the Operation Archive evacuees who had already reached or nearly reached Ever Grande should stay there for the night, and then come home.  Those who normally lived in Pacifidlog would also come to Sootopolis from Dewford and the Battle Resort the next day, and stay in the flood bunkers until the floating town was rebuilt.  Groudon’s island did not, in fact, block the entire undersea entrance to Sootopolis, so the submarine ferries could be used instead of the awkward elevators.

The storm had ended, as had the third day.  But storms leave damage, and the greater the storm the more ruin and chaos; and even Wallace did not yet see just how much more damage there was than fallen trees and flooded buildings and cracked caldera walls and scarred earth.  This had only been the first storm.  Or perhaps, really, it was the same storm, the same cause for it all, and only the weather had ended.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steven is barely holding it together for all of this. He hasn't slept, probably hasn't eaten, he's been having volcano flashbacks. He does a fairly good job of hiding it--he's been practicing this sort of thing since adolescence--but he slips, a little, even before the end of the chapter.
> 
> Also, yeah, Wallace's facial hair thing is a gender thing. He thinks he looks too masculine with stubble. He doesn't, actually, but he thinks he does.
> 
> I don't even know where I'm going with these endnotes. I will say that this was a hard chapter to write, possibly the hardest one--how to even make the whole thing with Rayquaza plausible: not the part with its actual appearance, that was comparatively easy, but how it gets to Sky Pillar, how to awaken it, why Wallace wouldn't know where or how to do it. I think I made it work. Oh, and yes, it is going to be 7 chapters. Probably between 20 and 25k words total.


	4. The Aftermath, Part 1: Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The storm is over, says the Weather Institute's BuzzNav channel, but not the minds of those who fought the mountain or the waves, and also not Hoenn's economy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for emetophobia and PTSD for this one. Also for economic disasters and austerity policies kinda.

Wallace woke up gasping; the air hurt as he drew it into his lungs: he’d been holding his breath in his sleep.  It had been Pacifidlog again, that wave….   It wasn’t real, he reminded himself, as his heart still pounded.  He was safe.  Wallace checked the other side of the bed; he hadn’t woken Steven this time, at least.

In the few weeks since the storm, Wallace had Steven over at his house a lot.  They made the token excuses, to reassure themselves that the League wouldn’t poke too much—Steven’s basement was still flooded, Groudon’s island needed scientific investigation, they were consulting about the wreck of a roe harvest.  All technically true.  But what it really was was that Steven still seemed to be lost in the storm, and (Wallace would barely admit, even to himself) having Steven next to him at night made Wallace a bit less likely to wake up gasping for air amid a dream tsunami wave—if only because Steven always stole all the covers, so Wallace couldn’t end up with blankets over his face.

But it didn’t completely stop the nightmares.  Wallace curled up around the blanket-bundle that was Steven, trying to comfort himself.  How had it gone this time?  The wave, yes, and then Kyogre was there too, and trying to eat him, but then the wave had happened again, going in that circular pattern that dreams have, only this time the wave was going into Kyogre’s mouth (the beast had somehow teleported to the opposite side of Pacifidlog), and then down and down into Kyogre’s stomach, in a neverending torrent of water and wood and Gyarados blood, everything was Gyarados blood.  He was going to drown in it.  And even then, Wallace hadn’t realized he was dreaming, hadn’t woken from terror, but only from how much it hurt when he had finally had to breathe, no matter what.  He reflected that he had probably held his breath for nearly five minutes.

He hugged Steven tighter, and eventually fell back to sleep.

He woke up a few hours later, cursing, when Steven accidentally hit him in the nipple.  Barely awake himself, Wallace realized that Steven was flailing around in his own nightmare—well, actually, had woken himself up, but was still half-dreaming and mostly tangled in the blankets.  And still screaming, too.

“Why can’t I move?  Where’s the colonel, he was right here?  I need to get away from the lava.”

“Steven.  Listen to me.  There’s no lava.”

“But I saw the lava.”

“There’s no lava.  You were dreaming.  You can’t move because those are blankets.”

It took most of another minute before Steven realized where he actually was.  Then Wallace finally dared come near him to try to comfort him, but Steven drew back.

“No,” he said.

“Do you want to talk—”

“No.”  And Steven lay down with his back to Wallace, pulled all the blankets back over himself, and pretended to be asleep.

Wallace, for his part, turned over on his stomach; it was starting to get light.  He rested his forehead on his crossed arms and practiced breathing slowly.  In, out.  In, out.  Concentrate on geometric shapes.  Let them grow bigger and smaller, darker and lighter.  Relax, almost asleep now….

And then his alarm went off.

Steven mumbled something about “another half hour”; Wallace decided to just get up.  He dressed, went downstairs, started cooking grits and boiling water for tea, and then went back upstairs to shave.

Re-entering the kitchen, he was greeted by a haze of smoke; he’d accidentally turned down the burner on the teapot, not the grits.  Wallace turned the burner off and pulled the pot off the stove, cursing nightmares, tiredness, and legendary pokemon.  The grits were beyond salvage.  Wallace put the pot on the sink counter, since it was too hot to clean; the Ludicolo would probably manage to eat this later.  He decided to get out eggs, cheese, and chopped seaweed instead.

Steven walked in, sleepily, started to say something, and then smelled the burnt grits.  Wallace watched in horror as Steven froze and went into that blank stare he had during his nightmares.  Then, Steven turned and ran out of the room.  Wallace followed, pausing only to set down the eggs.

He found Steven locked in the half-bath; from the sound of it, dry heaving into the toilet.  He knocked, cautiously.

“Go away!”

“Steven, are you okay in there?”

“I’m fine, just give me a few minutes.”

“You don’t sound fine.  Do you need to stay home today, if you’ve got a bug or something, just tell me what’s wrong—”

“I SAID LEAVE ME ALONE!!!”

Alarmed, Wallace did.  He went back to the kitchen and finished cooking breakfast.  At length he heard the front door open and shut; Steven hadn’t come back to eat his omelet.  Nor, as Wallace discovered, had he taken the sandwich left for him by the door.  Wallace put the sandwich in the fridge, and set about eating Steven’s omelet, too.

 

In the aftermath of the storm, the Sootopolis Gym was only open two days a week, and the League only one, instead of the usual four and three.   Partly, it was that all the League officials had so much work to do, rebuilding things and trying to keep Hoenn’s economy and world standing from going more to hell than they already had, but also just that so many Ace Trainers had dropped out of or delayed their challenge routes.  Projected fall enrollment for Ace Academy was also at a record low, so Steven had said, on one of the increasingly rare evenings when Wallace could get him to talk.  At this rate, there’d be a serious leadership crisis in twenty years—or else, pondered Wallace, Ace Academy might eventually become almost politically irrelevant.  Now that would be interesting.

Wallace returned to the next year’s budgets for Sootopolis, what he was supposed to be doing.  Put simply, the storm had thrown a wrench into everything.  Pacifidlog was gone, and therefore the means of harvesting Corsola roe most of this year, and everything harvested in the few weeks before the storm had gone with it.  So, nearly a quarter of Sootopolis’ usual annual income.  And he could safely say goodbye to three-quarters of the expected tourism, between storm damage to Sootopolis itself (though some would want to see Groudon Island, for sure) and the general economic collapse.  Carvanha roe would still happen, most of it, and the array of seaweed crops and rice, some of it, but with reduced export demand, especially if he raised prices or export taxes—basically, Sootopolis was likely to be running on about 40% of its usual funding, and then so much infrastructure needed repair.

And the cost of construction materials kept going up.  Wallace had managed to arrange a deal with Fortree for water-treated lumber to rebuild Pacifidlog the very afternoon the storm ended, using most of his personal discretionary budget and some borderline blackmail, but even then it had been noticeably above the usual pre-storm market price.  And then metal to reinforce the cracked caldera wall, damaged and lost equipment replaced: it was going to take years for Sootopolis to fully recover.  As only a small consolation, years for the rest of Hoenn, too.  (Save Fortree and Rustboro.  Curse them, they were making bank.)

What to cut from the budget: well, the Archon’s discretionary budget, for one thing.  And then what?  Well, he’d not cut vassal’s benefits, if he could help it.  But renovations to the schools, and new textbooks?  That could wait a few years.  His own clothing allowance—no new clothes then, unless his socks wore out.  Similarly, he could reduce his personal food budget a bit.  Eliminate nearly all the usual festival celebrations, or at least the banquets thrown with them, and the hired performers.  Move the temperature limits for climate control reimbursement five degrees each way.  Not repair the Gym (or much of anything, for that matter) beyond what was absolutely needed for functioning.  Focus all repairs on what created funds or was an immediate danger to Sootopolis.

He’d have to liquidate some of the foreign investments, in Kalos and Unova and Sinnoh.  There were some Unovan bonds that would mature in a couple years.  And then, if nothing else bad happened, if the rest of the Hoenn economy didn’t also plunge into unrelenting disaster, if the foreign markets kept wanting Sootopolitan products despite the price increases caused by shortages, then just possibly it would work, and Wallace would not become the first archon to put Sootopolis in debt.

Wallace pushed back his chair from his desk and all the myriad number-covered papers, and rubbed his eyes.  At this rate, he was going to need reading glasses before he was 35.

His phone rang.  Roxanne Stone-Winston?  Why was she calling him? He had her number, of course, he had all the League officials’ numbers, but neither had ever directly called each other before.  This was odd.

“Hello?”

“Leader Sootopolou—is that you?”

“Yes.  And to what do I owe this pleasant surprise, Leader Stone-Winston?”  Rustboro and Sootopolis were very rarely involved with each other’s League matters; and Rustboro Gym Leaders had no commercial authority beyond public works, which usually didn’t require Sootopolitan exports.

“There is a matter of policy for interacting with the League that I was advised you might have some expertise in.”

“Well, thank you for the compliment; though I’m far from an expert at any such thing not pertaining to the specific situation of Sootopolis.”

“Perhaps I should rephrase.  It is less a policy matter and more of a public relations or intra-league relations matter.  And it seemed that you were in the best position to deal with certain such matters pertaining to Hoenn’s current situation.”

“You mean our world standing in the aftermath of the Storm.”

“Yes.  Particularly, managing certain League officials’ personal world images at this time.”

“I am really sorry, but I have no involvement with the League PR office.  Though, I could give you the contact info for the public relations service that I personally use, if you would like, and perhaps some updates on the current status of certain league contacts, and oh do say hi to Devon President Stone for me—how is your uncle doing?”

“Wallace.  Forgive me, but I am going to speak frankly.  This is about Steven.  Who is my cousin.  Whom you are known to be sleeping with.  And who appears to be currently trying to exhaust himself to death as if that would somehow rebuild Hoenn.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry; you two are discreet enough that no one could actually call you unprofessional for it without admitting equal unprofessionality about their information sources.”  There probably wasn’t a single Gym Leader or Elite who didn’t hire a gaggle of private intelligence to set on all the other League officials and major corporate powers, but, like a good many other things about Hoenn politics, it was a thing that was talked around and never admitted, except in equally conspiratorial contexts.  Steven and Wallace still kept dossiers on each other, for appearances, and colluded on the ratios of accurate and deliberately misleading information in them.  “But really, I’ve known Steven my whole life, and you and I are about the only people he doesn’t tense up around when they get within conversational speaking distance.”

“I see.  Though, I thought he had been doing a decent job of appearing untraumatized to people who weren’t me.”

“He can’t hide that he’s lost twenty pounds and isn’t eating unless practically forced to.  Maybe you thought he was just tired in the evenings, but Flannery and Brawly work with him during the day and it’s the same thing.  Basically, they talked, and Flannery told me to talk to him, and I tried to but it didn’t work, so I’m calling you.  Get him to eat, and talk him out of this suicidally self-sacrificing attitude.”

“He _does_ eat when he’s with me, but then he’s only here a few nights a week.  I thought he was just stressed and forgetting meals, not deliberately avoiding them; that happens.  I will talk to him.”

“Thanks.  All personal connections aside, we can’t have him burn out like this, especially not  now.  Do try to get through to him.  Oh, and yes, I will try to talk my uncle into giving Sootopolis better deals on construction materials if you do that.”

Wallace chuckled.  “Well, you did say you were going to speak frankly.  Steven’s been trying the same thing, or at least he said he would if he had time, but President Stone’s been annoyed at him since he became an Elite and then wasn’t willing to have all policy dictated to him.  Dating me probably also didn’t help.”

“If I start complaining about my uncle’s ideas of what he should be able to get away with with Good Old Traditional Hoennian Nepotism, I’ll be here for hours, and I promised my kids I’d be home in time for dinner for once.  And I’m sure you’re busy as well.  But thank you for agreeing to talk to Steven.”

And with that and a few more pleasantries, they hung up.  Wallace slumped over his desk with his head on his arms, papers be damned.  Sootopolis _and_ Steven.  Curse the storm; it might still make him lose both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why do I make my characters Suffer I am a horrible person
> 
> Oh yeah, Wallace has _absolutely no idea_ what triggered Steven, because Steven won't talk about what happened with the volcano unless he literally wakes up screaming about it.
> 
> Hoenn's political system: I wouldn't call it _dysfunctional_ , because it does actually function pretty well, and I wouldn't call it _Byzantine_ , because there are very few assassinations, except perhaps of character (not to mention that the term is kinda Orientalizing), but definitely internecine, nepotistic, semi-corrupt, and classist. (Sootopolis is not immune to this. Due to its own charter, it is basically guaranteed that you won't starve to death or die of exposure or medical neglect even if you're in the lowest compensation tier, but the compensation tiers are very rigid and very strongly tied to public ostentation, and nearly all the highest-tier positions are essentially hereditary.) And, of course, there's a lot of pretending to conform to an official code of conduct while actually conforming to an even stricter (in a way) than the official code is purported to be, but less salutary, unofficial code. Oh, and then, partly just because Hoenn is a fairly small country, but also because of the class divide, pretty much everybody in the political class/"High Families" is related to each other in some way or another, and they've pretty much all gone through Ace Academy, which is an almost undisguised gatekeeping institution, so literally everyone who's anyone knows each other far too well to actually be "professional" about much of anything, but they have to still pretend to be, for the sake of saving face. Wallace and Roxanne's conversation is a prime example of all of this.


	5. The Aftermath, Part 2: Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Living is repetition, of thoughts as well as actions. And when routines are pushed off balance, a new balance forms; but for some that is an approximation of the original, and for some the ultimate balance of entropy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is written from inside Wallace and Steven's heads, and so the second half of the chapter is literally the thought processes of a suicidally depressed character with severe PTSD, so if it's not triggering, I'm a terrible writer. But there's plot stuff, so I'll put a summary at the end that's more an "outside" perspective (aka what you'd get from reading between the lines anyway).

For Wallace, it is an exercise in not feeling.   Not feeling the gnawing worry that is a constant presence for the first time in his life—is there enough, is this enough, will this last until, can this thing wait, can we afford; can Steven keep going, is Steven eating, why can’t I help him.

Not feeling how cold it is, too cold for June in Hoenn, the sky still thick with ash from Mt. Chimney.  Not feeling the fear of _what will this winter be like_ , whether that will be the final blow that completely destroys his district’s economy, of (aside from money) what will happen when the southernmost district of a subtropical country experiences an actual winter for the first time in centuries.

Not feeling a rush of panic when the waves lap a little too high under the now perpetually grey skies—except he does feel it, and pretends he doesn’t, and swims harder, longer; in his own tongue, in the words one does not say to mainlanders, because that is not safe, he is meant to be king of the seas, _Vasilefs Thalassion_ , and he will, must, master them.  Not feeling, not admitting, that he almost drowned in the storm, because that is the worst fate:  to be rejected by the sea; for the water that gives life to take it instead, and say _you are not worthy._   It is the worst shame possible, and it almost happened to him. 

And he can’t forget any of it.  His job, at the heart of it, is to see and remember the history of his people, and he has been trained to remember, look, record, since he learned how to talk.  In others, Wallace reads, one night when Steven isn’t there and he can’t fall asleep again after a nightmare, the mark of trauma would be an inability to fully remember, in order, what had happened.  For Wallace, it is that he remembers every detail, minutely, sequentially, and can’t forget.  Living, after this, is an exercise in not feeling the great wave crashing down on him, not feeling the wood in the water hit him, as sharply as if it were still happening.

So he stands at the edge of the water in the swimming area of Sootopolis harbor, bites his lip, and dives in quickly—too tense—willing fear away.

But the worst of this is that there seems to be a wall of glass (water, obsidian) between him and Steven.  Steven, who does not just bundle himself up against the unnaturally cold summer, but also will not let even Wallace touch him; who is there more than ever, but as if only to be more, and more emphatically, distant: “No,” “I can’t,” “I’m tired,” “Not now,” “Just don’t,” “Please,” “I’m sorry.”

It is a miserably failing, impossible exercise in not feeling.  Not feeling his world shattering— _continuing to shatter, it had been shattering since those monsters appeared on his doorstep—_ and his own soul breaking, forced as it is to be the scaffold that keeps the last remnants of everything he loves together.

 

For Steven, it is an exercise in not being.  Not being the man who could not stop a volcano.  Not being the man who didn’t manage to stop a threat before it was known as one.  Not being someone who thus endangered everyone he held dear.  Not being so useless as to have to let a couple of children end the threat for him, while he stood by and then collapsed.  Not being, anymore, the rising star of Hoenn, that wunderkind who was the youngest champion elected since the founding of the League; but instead a deadly meteor.

Better not to be, for Steven, than to be such a failure.

This decision is less a conscious act, and more a constant “Why bother?” Because he is still determined to fix what little he can of the destruction he feels he caused, before…he doesn’t really  know, yet, it’s too much bother to think about, but at some point, when his work is done and Hoenn could survive it, perhaps resign his office and go to bed and pray never to wake up.  It would be hardly more of a failure on his part, then, than what he has already done.  And with that much decided, why bother with ephemera?  That is for people who still want to be alive.

And so he doesn’t eat, except when hunger gets so bad that it interferes with his reconstruction duties (and then he still waits another half-hour, or hour, or two hours, because it’s so silly and pointless, how his body is still alive and asking for food when so many people who wanted to live are dead because of him), or when Wallace makes food for him, because Wallace is the one person whom he somehow seems to have not disappointed yet, and doesn’t want to (and he does not deserve it.  Wallace will someday realize, and hate him, for what he allowed to happen to Sootopolis, or Steven will die, and that will disappoint Wallace too, so he pulls away, still selfishly wanting that kindness, but trying to soften the blow of what an utter useless failure he is).  All of this means he eats about half the calories necessary for an active man his height.

(It’s easier, really.  Most food has always been too spicy or sweet or acidic or textured or bitter or too many smells, and then one has to prepare it or tell someone else to and how, and it is a relief to let this chore of existence go.)

Of course, people notice, eventually.  That’s good, they’ll see how terrible he is at this whole existing thing, they won’t be too shaken when he finally fails entirely at it; they’ll look back and see that they didn’t really need him in the first place.  Really, what was he ever any good at?  A lot of technical knowledge of pokemon, which, despite popular philosophy, is not a good basis for the ability to lead an entire country.  If he were any good at _that_ , he’d at least be able to remember the nearly twenty-nine hours between Mt. Chimney’s first eruption and when Wallace called him back to Sootopolis, and then between then and when he’d woken up on Wallace’s couch the morning after—in more than bits and pieces, anyway.  It is the ultimate irony: he caused the thing, and can’t even remember half of it.

Perhaps “exercise in not being” is not even the best phrasing.  “Exercise” involves some notion of practice.  Steven is doing the real thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger-free-ish summary: Wallace and Steven are both having Issues, but especially Steven. Drowning is a really taboo form of death in Sootopolitan culture, and it almost happened to Wallace, which makes it especially bad for him; he's like mildly scared of water now. Steven, meanwhile, thinks he basically caused the whole thing and has hella survivor's guilt, and decides he doesn't deserve to live, and so pretty much stops eating. They both want emotional support from each other but feel guilty about making the other be that support and so don't. This slightly strains their relationship. Also, Hoenn doesn't have a summer that year, bc all the ash from Mt. Chimney in the air.
> 
> Oh god why did i think this was a good idea to do to my characters Steven Stone is a precious cinnamon roll i mean i know it's realistic but why am i treating him like this


	6. The Aftermath, Part 3: Evening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Juan gives relationship/life advice. It works. Slightly better than he probably expected or ever wants to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The long-promised sex scene finally happens in this chapter. Pretty much equal parts plot and sad blowjobs tbh.

Wallace stared out his office window at the sea, as if his eyes could bring the waves (or what they brought to mind) into submission.  Leaning on the windowsill, he looked like a carnelian statue, complete with draperies (he was wearing that ruffled blue tank top he loved so much); marred only by the red line of the scar he’d gotten from Pacifidlog.

 _Well, at least it seems he doesn’t get those raised scars like I do._   Juan knocked on the doorframe and entered the room.

The statue crumbled.  Wallace startled, overbalanced, and flailed, hitting his hand on the window frame; but he didn’t quite fall.

_“Are you okay there?”_

_“Yeah, yeah, fine, didn’t even chip a nail.”_   (They were painted silver, Juan noticed.)

“ _Good.  But also, you know, in general.”_

_“How do you mean?”_

_“Dealing with the storm.  You seem—well…you’re not the first person in this family to go through a certain level of awful, and well…like just now….”_

_“I’m doing as well as could be expected, for…that.”_ (One does not say that word, _drowning_.  Not even with the adverb _almost_.)  _“A little hypervigilance, obviously, some nightmares; I think it’ll pass.  Once this financial situation is past, anyway.  Believe me, there are people doing much worse.”_

 _“Steven?”_   When Wallace raised his eyebrows, Juan added, _“I’m retired, not dead.  I still keep up with the unofficial information channels.”_

 _“Well, you’re right.  As usual.  I don’t know what to do with him.”_   Wallace walked to his desk and not so much sat as flopped down.  _“Apparently, he’s not eating much except to look like he’s making an effort for my cooking—so Roxanne says--he’s been working himself to death beyond anything actually being demanded of him, he suddenly has no sense of self-preservation, like he just can’t be bothered, which is really odd since he normally freaks out if so much as one of my skitties sneaks up on him, we haven’t had…um, done anything since the day before the storm, he hasn’t wanted to, and he just f-won’t talk to me!  And I’ve tried, but there is only so much I can do when he just sits there and insists he’s fine and won’t even try to do anything!  I can’t just do everything and hold everything together—I can’t, it just doesn’t work that way!”_

Wallace looked up at his father, face now streaked with tears.  _“I mean, I know he saw people dying in lava or something, he wakes up screaming about it, but I saw things just as bad, and I don’t know why it’s so much worse for him, or why he won’t even admit it to me, or why he won’t let me do anything.”_

 _“It’s not your fault,”_ said Juan, stroking Wallace’s hair.  _“You can’t tell how people will react to things like this.  You can take two people with almost identical upbringing, expose them to the same thing, and one might shake it off in a few weeks or years, and the other might never be able to even talk about it, even to tell the bare minimum of what happened. I’ve seen that._

 _“What might work,”_ he continued, _“is you showing him how much you’re affected.  He still tries to eat to make you happy, right?”_

Wallace nodded.  _“Yeah, when I’m actually there.  Usually.  But not the rest of the time, from the looks of it.  Like he only wants not to waste my effort actually making the food.”_

_“If I had to guess, he wants to not hurt you, and just doesn’t care about himself.  It can be like that.  And possibly, he cares so little about himself that he doesn’t realize that you care about his safety too.  It might take awhile to sink in, but try that.”_

_“And what if that doesn’t work?”_

_“If he gets to be a lethally serious immediate danger to himself, I’ll arrange something.  Temporarily incapacitating construction accident as a cover, maybe.  But that would be a lot of bother and also highly illegal, so try the guilt-trip approach first.”_

_“I’m just scared,”_ whispered Wallace.  _“I’m a freaking Archon, but this…?”_

 _“A thing I thought you already learned, is that you can’t save everything.  Your job is definitionally impossible.”_   He paused, biting his lip.  _“I will admit, that lesson goes much harder when it actually happens.”_

Juan turned toward the door, then turned back.  _“Oh, what I originally came here for.  The order receipt for those construction materials, lot 2296709.  To compare with the shipment’s inventory slip and the actual shipment itself.”_

 _“You mean those large bolts, reverse-threaded, assorted sizes? Hang on, it was here somewhere.”_ Wallace fished around in the (now slightly tear-stained) papers on his desk, and eventually retrieved something from the floor behind it.  _“Yeah, here.  And—thanks, Dad.”_

 

So far, Steven’s visit that night had gone as usual.  He’d eaten his soup mechanically; hadn’t asked for more, but when Wallace had refilled his bowl, had eaten the second serving with the same utter lack of either enthusiasm or reluctance.  And after that, he’d sat on Wallace’s couch like a lump while Wallace tried (and failed) to focus on the Kalosian novel he was reading next to him.

After about half an hour of this, Wallace couldn’t stand it any longer.  He put down his book (resisting the urge to throw it across the room), and moved closer to Steven.

“You know, I could use some emotional support too, occasionally.”

“Fine, I’ll go,” said Steven resignedly.

“What? No, stay here,” said Wallace, grabbing Steven by the shoulder and pulling him back onto the couch.  He didn’t let go, and Steven didn’t struggle.

“I’m just disappointing you,” said Steven, bitterly (or it would have been bitter, if his voice hadn’t been so despondently toneless).  “So I should just go.  Because it just kind of inevitably happens.  Either with what I’m failing at now, or when you eventually realize how badly I failed Sootopolis, not to mention the rest of Hoenn.  Either way, I’m a complete disappointment and you shouldn’t have to put up with me.”

“Steven.  Stay here and listen to me.  You are not disappointing me.  Not the way you mean.  Frustrating me sometimes, yes.  Making me worried sick, yes.  But the only way you could ever disappoint me, fail me, is to make me watch you kill yourself slowly like this.  Oh, and don’t think killing yourself quickly would be any less disappointing.  You want to not be disappointing?  Then stay here and live.”

“What if I can’t?”

“Well, you can start by always eating at least two meals a day.  Actual meal-sized meals.”

“Fine.”  Steven felt like this was completely unfair.  In order to not disappoint Wallace, he had to forgo the only way he could see to atone for his negligence?  No, it wasn’t unfair, he did deserve this, to have only a choice between two different damnations.  Still internally complaining about it (and cursing himself for his selfishness in complaining about a totally deserved fate), he curled up into the arm of the couch, away from Wallace.

“No, look at me.  I need to know that you mean it.”

“I don’t get why you care about me!” yelled Steven, now practically wrestling with Wallace to avoid being uncurled from a depressed ball.  “Not after what I did.  I could have tracked down the orbs.  I could have stopped the storm weeks before it happened, or at least made it so only one pokemon got loose.  But no, I chose a slightly less cost-intensive route, and it nearly got you killed.  It did get a whole lot of other people killed.  I don’t get how you can even want to forgive me after that.”

“May I remind you,” said Wallace, who had now pinned Steven on his back to keep him from looking away (and Steven had realized he could be just as depressed facing Wallace as not, so he stopped struggling), “that no one, except possibly the ecoterrorists themselves, and I doubt they were sure, and certainly not you, actually thought the orbs could work?  We still have no explanation how they do.  By all existing theories, they shouldn’t have.  And if anyone should have had any idea that they would, that would be me.  You know, the Gym Leader of the district where the entire Midwinter ceremony is based around Groudon, Kyogre, and Rayquaza.  And I didn’t.  So there.  There is literally nothing to forgive or hold a grudge about.  _It’s not your fault._ ”

“Yes it is, because I didn’t catch the groups sooner!” retorted Steven, trying to curl up again.

“No it’s not, that’s the City Rangers’ job…oh. Um.  This is a bit awkward.”

Steven was puzzled for a second, but then…shit.  He hadn’t noticed at first, between emotions and yelling and his efforts to curl into a ball and having to fight Wallace’s efforts to stop him, but somewhere in all of that, and probably because of it (it was more physical contact than he’d had in weeks, and after the first proper meal he’d had in days), he’d gotten hard.  And it was extremely visible.  The fucking irony.

Wallace and Steven stared at each other for nearly a full minute, argument temporarily forgotten and replaced with such things as “ _We haven’t had sex in nearly two months,” “What even is this relationship right now,” “How the fuck did I just accidently end up pinning and straddling him and what does that say about my life,”_ and _“Why the fuck did I let him pin me down when I know I like this and did he plan it, no that’s impossible he can’t possibly want me I’m too much of a mess.”_

“Um,” asked Wallace, finally breaking the silence, “seriously, when was the last time you got off?  You’re usually pretty responsive, but not, well, that much.”

“About three weeks ago,” replied Steven, covering his face in embarrassment.  “Maybe four? Honestly, I don’t really remember.”

“Do you want me to…?”

“I don’t fucking deserve it.”

“Steven, that’s not—“

“I couldn’t stop them, I can’t fix what they did, I can’t even get Kalos to extradite them because some fucking chemical company called ‘Lysandre Labs’ thinks ‘their minds are too valuable to waste’ and has contacts—yeah, that’s how my day went, listening to this bearded Kalosian douchebag defend genocidal terrorists, they’re probably related or something—so how on earth do I deserve anything?”

“I don’t care if you deserve anything.” _Though you deserve everything, and who ever told you you didn’t?_   “I asked whether you wanted it.”

 _I’m selfish and terrible for even thinking about wanting this, but_ “Yeah,” said Steven. “Please.”

Wallace reached down and began unbuttoning Steven’s pants.  What he really wanted to do was just grind his own crotch into Steven’s, but he needed to show Steven that he did too deserve to feel good, whether or not it benefitted Wallace as well.  He got Steven’s pants down to his knees— _no cut or burn marks on his thighs at least, thank Arceus_ —and began stroking him firmly, the way Steven like it, running his thumb over the flushed head.

“Wallace?”

“Hmm?”

“Bite me.  Please.”

Wallace stopped.  “Do not use me to hurt yourself.  I can’t bear that.”

“No!  It’s not like that.  And you know I like biting normally.”  Steven’s face scrunched up, as if he were about to cry, but he didn’t.  “I just—Nothing even feels real.  Just all that fucking lava and all those people, and I guess Rayquaza a bit, and nothing since.  Sometimes I feel like I actually died then, and I honestly wish I had.  But you want me to live for some reason, I guess, so I need this to feel real.  I need to know it happened.”

“All right.”  He still didn’t feel very good about doing this, now, and not even just the biting at this point, but this was the most he’d ever gotten out of a fully awake Steven about his part in the Storm.  Perhaps he should have tried jumping him sooner.

Steven had gotten his shirt mostly open while Wallace had been getting his pants down; Wallace undid the last few buttons and pushed back the fabric.  He began to suck and bite at Steven’s collarbone, while rubbing Steven’s nipple with his right hand.  His ribs stuck out far too much, and it physically hurt Wallace to see that, but…this was Steven, and Wallace could finally touch him and taste him and hold him and make him feel good, and now he couldn’t help but grind a little against Steven, as he kissed and licked and bit his way down his chest and stomach.

“Uh, Wallace,” said Steven, as Wallace took hold of Steven’s dick again and prepared to put his mouth on it, “you probably don’t want to do that; I haven’t showered in like two days.”

“I’ve already had my mouth all over you, and I want to do this.”

Wallace began bobbing his head up and down Steven’s length, and yeah the taste was as bad as he’d been warned, but he didn’t care; right now, he would face down all three weather pokemon again and all the wild zubats in Hoenn for his Steven.  He continued working his tongue around the crown, one hand on the shaft and the other stroking Steven’s abs, then taking his cock down as far as he could and hollowing his cheeks (Steven was squirming now, hips moving side to side to avoid thrusting up), and then almost all the way off and just a _tiny_ bit of teeth on the underside while using his tongue on the slit and rolling Steven’s balls, and then Steven came in his mouth with a whimper, and Wallace desperately swallowed every bit of it.

His jaw ached, and his crotch fucking hurt from lack of attention (he hadn’t even unbuttoned his pants yet), and yes thank Arceus those _were_ tissues on the coffee table.  Wallace finished himself off almost embarrassingly quickly, and then turned back to check on Steven.

Steven had curled up on his side, still half-naked, with one arm over his face.  And…he _was_ crying.  It was only the third time Wallace had ever seen Steven cry, and one of the other two times had been after a fairly terrible sexual misadventure, so he began to instantly regret the entire last thirty minutes.

“Um, are you okay?” asked Wallace, after a bit, and then instantly regretted that too, because of course Steven was not okay, he himself wasn’t okay, nothing was okay at all these days, and least of all Steven, and that was the entire reason this all had happened in the first place.

But in answer, Steven sat up, grabbed Wallace so hard he thought Steven was going to crack ribs, and started sobbing into his shoulder.  Relieved beyond words, Wallace hugged Steven back, pulling him onto his lap, and let his own tears fall into Steven’s hair.

“I’m ruining your blouse,” hiccupped Steven a long while later, looking up with a tear- and snot-streaked face.

“It’ll wash.”

And they sat there, far into the evening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WORDS TO USE TO WRITE NON-IRONIC SMUT AND ALSO HAVE NEVER TOUCHED A DICK FORGIVE ME
> 
> Lol this is the second time I've done better at writing truly awkward origin cuddles instead of the actual sex scenes which go way better before I type them.
> 
> Also, I have no idea how healthy parent/adult child interaction works and am kind of desperately making it up as I go along tell me how I did I want attention.


	7. Epilogue: Partially Cloudy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get better--slowly.

People can’t fix other people.  That’s not how it works.  What they can do is help provide the tools and motivation to fix yourself, or at least to survive until a period of awfulness finally ends on its own.

For example, by texting you “did u eat dinner” every evening.  Or, when they find out that your definition of eating regularly consists entirely of ordering a large case of the very blandest microwave noodle bowls on the internet and eating two per day, by making the most horrified face you have ever seen and going to the Pokemart _right then_ and buying you a freezer-ful of individually portioned frozen vegetables (you didn’t even know they made those).  Or by telling you to _call in sick this once, dammit,_ and taking you not to the chiropractor you told Flannery you were going to, but to a trauma counselor who worked in the same building (because someone would see you going there, and you don’t want Glacia getting ideas).  Or maybe even….

“Go on, open the pokeball,” encouraged Wallace.

“It’s a good day if I manage to shower, and you want me to raise a pokemon for you?”

“Just open it.”

“A baltoy?  Um, thanks? But like I said, this is not the best time for me to be raising a baby pokemon.  This is like level 5, it’ll need 24/7 care—“

“Level 26, actually.  It’s a dwarf variety, so it’ll be still house-sized even when it evolves.  It’s a therapy pokemon.”

“Really, you didn’t need to.”

“Consider it an early Midwinter present—because it did take all I’d budgeted for your Midwinter present.  But you told me once that you used to use your Metagross to help you calm down, back when it was a Beldum, but then it evolved and got too big to be let out indoors.  So I thought this might work, and the Baltoy’s actually been trained to do that, unlike your former Beldum, so it should do even better.  Though I did get one with slightly more special attack than normal for therapy Baltoys, because knowing you, you’ll want to battle with it.”

“Wallace, thanks,” said Steven, still holding the Baltoy, which was snuggling up to him and making humming noises.

Steven slept that night without nightmares, for the first time without having had to work himself to complete exhaustion first.

And a few weeks later, Wallace dove into the water for his morning swim and went two laps before he remembered that he was supposed to be afraid of something.

And though it was getting on towards autumn, the temperature rose higher than it had been all summer in Hoenn, as the skies finally began to clear.  Hoenn would heal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AaaaaAAAaaah thanks for reading this you guys! Lol I'm never going to put these cinnamon rolls through so much pain again.
> 
> Also wow I need a psychic pokemon to get me to do things too. It probably just chirps at Steven when he forgets to eat or do laundry. And like it's so cute that you simply can't bear to make it worry about you. Tbh I think the way therapy pokemon would work is that they emit psychic waves that don't actually manipulate your thoughts but kind of get your brainwaves to sync up with the wave pattern, kind of like that thing on _The Flash_ where they need to have Cisco share his dream, so you end up becoming calm that way.
> 
> Thanks also to everyone who commented, and especially to Oudeteron, who not only commented lots and very constructively but also beta'd certain bits of the story (Wallace's nightmare, and maybe a couple other paragraphs). You guys are all great.


End file.
